Quote of the Day (Anthony Powell, on the Artlessness of Great Writing)

"I do think that if a book is really well written, it's terribly difficult to see how it's done. I think it's part of the mystery of writing that the real great hands always conceal how they do it. And an awful lot of bad writing is due to people trying to write like great writers and not really seeing that the outer covering has nothing to do with it at all."--British novelist (A Dance to the Music of Time) Anthony Powell, interviewed by Michael Barber, in “Anthony Powell, The Art of Fiction No. 68," Paris Review, Spring-Summer 1978